Award-winning Kaytetye filmmaker Warwick Thornton is making his debut at Red CentreNATS in Alice Springs this week, turning heads not with a polished show car but with a battered, heavily-modified 1970s Toyota FJ 40 bull chaser he has spent roughly a decade bringing back from the dead.
The four-day festival — the Northern Territory counterpart to Canberra's Summernats — celebrates horsepower in all its forms, drawing hundreds of amateur and professional car enthusiasts to Central Australia and providing a significant boost to the local economy. It opened its gates today.
A passion project born under a mango tree
Thornton, whose films Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country have earned him recognition at Cannes and cemented his status as one of Australia's most accomplished directors, has long harboured a deep love of cars that goes well beyond the red carpet.
He hunts them down, buys them, and then spends long hours tinkering in backyards and sheds around Alice Springs coaxing their engines back to life. The bull chaser he is entering this year was discovered in a particularly sorry state.
"I found it under a big old mango tree, covered in bat shit, rotting — just completely rotting," Thornton says.
He and his son, filmmaker Dylan River, hauled the vehicle from the Top End back to Alice Springs, where Thornton set about restoring it over the better part of a decade. He is candid about the car's remaining rough edges, joking that potential passengers "probably need a tetanus shot to actually drive it" — a vehicle that, among other things, currently has no brakes.
What is a bull chaser — and why does it matter?
Bull chasers are a distinctly Australian invention, born of necessity on remote cattle stations. These stripped-down, short-wheelbase four-wheel-drives are fitted with heavy bull bars, reinforced steel side plates and gutted interiors, purpose-built for tearing through rough scrub country.
Their job was to harry feral scrub bulls — nudging them with tyres mounted at the front or slapping them along with a steel side plate — driving them toward a bull catcher equipped with a mechanical arm that could grab and restrain the animal.
"These things were built to get in there, give [bulls] a tap with those tyres on the front, or give them a slap on the arse with that big side plate there, and push him out where there would be a bull catcher waiting," Thornton explains.
Amber Driver, who runs Elkedra Station approximately 400 kilometres north of Alice Springs, confirms that similar vehicles are still in active use across the region's cattle industry. She describes them as "quite an iconic part of the Central Australian and also Northern Australian cattle industry."
For Thornton, the restoration is as much about cultural preservation as it is mechanical passion. "I have such love and respect for this — this would have been flogged," he says of the vehicle's likely fate had it been left to rot.
Where filmmaking and car culture meet
Thornton draws a clear line between his two great loves, arguing they are driven by the same creative fuel.
"Where they intersect is in storytelling," he says. "Lust and envy and a certain amount of madness is the basis of storytelling."
He points to a long tradition of Australian cinema built around car culture, noting it was a fascination he carried well before he ever considered life behind a camera. "There are so many great Australian films about car culture and I was watching that even before I thought I'd be a cinematographer, let alone a director," he says. "It's always been a part of me."
The Mad Max-esque bull chaser may not be the most glamorous entry at this year's Red CentreNATS, but for Thornton it represents something far more layered — a rolling piece of outback history, rescued from obscurity by what he freely admits is "a certain amount of madness."
